The City

by Erik Hinrichsen

Overview

Take a dark journey through the subterranean alleyways of a mysterious and dangerous city. This collection of paranormal and dark fantasy stories presents a series of vignettes depicting the city’s residents—good and bad, evil and innocent. Haunting, beautiful, dark, and disturbing by turns, it explores the nightmarish, surreal, and supernatural events that challenge even the most vivid of imaginations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491795903
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	212
File size:	298 KB

Read an Excerpt

The City

---

By Erik Hinrichsen

iUniverse

Copyright © 2016 Erik Hinrichsen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9591-0

---

CHAPTER 1

PART 1

THE OLD MAN

He stood in the crowd, unnoticed. Just another old man. Bored. With too much time on his hands. Old cotton shirt with a stiff collar. Blue boating shoes. Pants two inches too short.

The sidewalk was crowded. The area cordoned off by yellow tape. Across the street, an old building was about to collapse. Dynamite was strategically placed. Demolitions crews walked around purposefully with hard hats and clipboards. A city official wearing a cheap cotton suit, looking hot and uncomfortable, talked to someone from the media, preening for the camera.

Everyone wore sunglasses. More than half were jabbering away on cell phones. Talking business. Trying to look important. Or perhaps not really talking to anyone at all, but just pretending.

The old man wasn't talking. He wasn't wearing sunglasses. He never had and was too old to start now. He liked to see things the way they were. Not much use for a portable phone either. There was no one he wanted to talk to. There was no one left to call. He stared up at the building, old and decrepit now, like himself. Many years ago, he had walked along its iron girders, eaten lunch from a metal box while dangling his feet into thin air. Good friends and fellow workers were there too, and they would talk about their families or tell corny jokes. Sometimes they just looked out across the fledgling city, a metropolis they were building rivet by rivet, beam by beam. In those moments, they knew a quiet pride, a sense of reason. Nothing else mattered. Just the sound of traffic far below and the taste of bitter, hot coffee. A blown whistle. Back to work. Day after day. Year after year. Building after building.

Then a moment came, and they were all old men. Retirement. Condominiums. Grandchildren. Aches and pains. Doctors. Hospitals. Funeral arrangements.

Walking the dog. Smoking a pipe. Staring out the window at nothing. Thoughts adrift on alien seas. Sometimes no thoughts at all. Traversing the same block. Back and forth. Three times a day. Cold weather or hot.

Back to the apartment. Give the dog a bone. Turn on the TV. Read a book and nod off. Wake up thinking the phone rang. Stare out the window again. Read the ingredients on the backs of cereal boxes. Smooth imaginary creases in the cushion of the chair. Lock the door. Draw the blinds. Turn off the lights. Go to sleep. Idly wonder if there will be a tomorrow. Wake up. Repeat.

This was the last building he had worked on. Fifty years. Down to two minutes and counting. He had watched the others fall, one by one. And in their place, expanded parking lots, stadiums, shopping malls. Even a discount shoe outlet. A low-rent apartment complex.

Years ago, for reasons he couldn't fathom, he had tried contacting old friends, fellow workers who had helped him build these great edifices. Spent time tracking down phone numbers and addresses at the public library.

Writing names on drugstore receipts in the dead of night. Names and faces slowly resurfacing after decades submerged in dark waters.

Talking to sons and wives, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. Widows. Awkward conversations.

But they were all gone. He hadn't been looking for their names in the obituaries. Their passing went unnoticed. Their walk through the valley of the shadow of death unseen.

One minute and counting. The crowd getting agitated. A spectator sport. Something to talk about at the office. The power of explosives. Quickened jabbering on wireless headsets. Words then reconstructed byte by byte by some satellite circling the earth.

A pushing forward. An elbow in the back. Obscenities harshly whispered. The hard hats moving quickly toward a hastily constructed tin shelter. The city official hauling ass to his car. A collectively held breath. A dog barking in the distance. A Klaxon wail. The muted creaking of rubber soles on cement. Tasseled loafers scrunching.

A low rumble. Gouts of dust from the building's broken windows. Cement turned into sand, imploding sideways and down. Down through the morning sunlight. A gray vesper of soot. A momentary eclipse. Debris floating on indolent currents of air. Scraps of paper. Shards of splintered glass imbedding themselves in the mud below. A collective sigh from the crowd. A light clapping and slapping of backs. Hard hats emerging from their shelter.

Sweat glistening like dirty jewels on their faces.

The crowd dispersing. Heading toward the new city. The old man, head bent, hands in pockets, walking in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER 2

THE OLD WOMAN

In the yard, the grass was high. There were many weeds. The asphalt driveway was heavily pitted. It sloped at the sides. A rusted red tricycle sat near the front porch, leaning on its right back wheel. Flowers in their pots drooping over the sides like paint from a can.

She sat in her favorite chair and looked out of the bay window. It had three heavy glass panes. A large white doily sat squarely on the enclosed wooden section, a prickly cactus in a coffee can holding it down.

From this viewpoint, she could see almost everything that happened on her street. The TV swam in and out of her consciousness. Infomercials, relentless pesticides, beautiful roses in just a few short minutes a day. Exercise equipment showing perfectly shaped young bodies happily doing repetition after repetition on the latest isometric torture machine.

A thick layer of dust covered everything. She could no longer keep the place tidy. In the kitchen sink, three bowls sat stacked, waiting to be washed, congealing canned soup residue making them stick firmly together. In the freezer, a gallon of year-old chocolate ice cream grew a coat of icicles.

Next to the refrigerator was the phone. A rotary one. Its white now yellowed by time. There was even dust in the round pegs where you put your finger in to dial a number. It was really just an ornament, an object that would shrilly ring when solicitors jammed up the fiber-optic cables. The other day, maybe last week, her lawyer had called. He wanted to talk about finalizing her will. He wanted to know when he could expect to be paid for work done. She told him she'd write him a check straight away. This seemed to appease him. They talked about the weather. Winter was coming. He told her she should be sure to have her furnace checked. Otherwise, it could get mighty cold in the house. Their conversation ended on a pleasant, noncommittal note.

The boy down the street, in the house with the blue shutters, was riding his skateboard again. She could hear the graphite wheels grinding on the curb when he went flying off into the street without looking. Where was his mother? Wasn't she watching him? Maybe she was at work. In all the time the old woman had been looking out the window, she'd never once seen her. Or his father. Maybe they were divorced. Could be he was adopted. Perhaps the boy was older than he looked. After all, she couldn't really see that well, even with her glasses. The prescription was ten years old, and she didn't want to see any more doctors.

Watching the boy, she felt a distracting pang of remorse. Or was it guilt? Maybe it was both. Or maybe it wasn't either. But what bothered her was that she didn't have any children of her own. Thus, no grandchildren. The tricycle had been by the porch when she'd moved in. A ranch home, so she wouldn't have to climb up any stairs. Bones gone brittle with age. It took all her strength just to get the mail out of the box by the front door. And the paint was peeling on it. They looked like pencil shavings, lying there in between the screen door and the metal strip that kept the drafts from getting in.

But still, she was cold. She hobbled over to check the thermostat in the hallway. The red indicator said it was working. On either side of it were two pictures of the same thing: two black-and-white oleanders in full bloom. She didn't remember where she'd gotten them. Could they have been there before she moved in?

She moved slowly back to the chair and sat down. Her knees made a crunching noise. The quilt was thick but a bit tattered. She liked to grip it with her knobby fingers. The TV was silent for a brief instant in between the commercial break and the continuation of the talk show. She waited anxiously for the host to appear on screen. When he did, she looked out the window again.

The maple tree on the lawn had lost all its leaves, but she didn't see any on the ground. Could the people from the city have come and sucked them up with one of those giant tubes? She didn't remember seeing anyone. Maybe she'd dozed off. Today was Tuesday. Tomorrow was Wednesday. They picked up the garbage on Friday. That left a few more days before she saw the big truck with the compactor built right inside it. Sometimes they scrunched up all the trash right in front of her house before moving on to the next set of cans.

The drone of the TV made her nod off again. She dreamed of gray feathers falling around the room, as if someone were having a pillow fight. Then, through the feathers falling like snow, she saw a door. It looked old and heavy. Maybe it was made of iron. Near the top was a small aperture with metal bars. A face peered in. Their eyes met, and the face in the portal nodded as if to itself and then disappeared.

The large door opened on squeaky hinges. A very average-looking man dressed in a black suit and red tie came into the room. Most of his hair was gone, and his bald pate was shiny, as if damp. He held out his hand, beckoning her. At first, she didn't want to go. But then, she knew she must. Besides, it was too cold in here, just sitting in the chair, watching the days go by.

Nothing ever changed. Her food was insipid. She couldn't even discern her own body odor. Yet the man was still smiling. He didn't seem to mind her sad state of affairs. So, with a will she didn't know she still possessed, she got out of the chair and followed him. Right through the big metal door. Into another room exactly like the one she'd just left. There, he motioned with his hands for her to sit down on the black recliner by the window.

She did. Her knees creaked. The shawl was slightly tattered. She liked to rub the material with her knobby fingers. The rusted tricycle still sat by the porch, leaning on one side. The solitary tree on the lawn was still leafless. The street looked deserted. All the doors were shut. And every single one was painted black.

The drone of the TV made her nod off again.

Only she wasn't sleeping.

CHAPTER 3

THE SUICIDE

Midnight. The old bridge was deserted. Traffic had been detoured elsewhere. He had parked his car along the pier and then walked the rest of the distance.

The water below seemed very far away. Black and distant. Moonlight seldom touched the surface with its pale luminescence. No boats were on the river. The last ring of a church bell hung suspended in the dense fog.

On the far shore, he saw the glittering lights of the city. Neon marquees blinked on and off like a dull, throbbing headache. Cold winds gusted over the water, a sheet of chilling mist rising up almost to the top of the bridge before dividing into a pair of freezing liquid arms, ready to embrace him.

Graffiti covered the superstructure like pustulated sores, spray paint gore gone on a rampage until nothing could be discerned. Empty beer cans lay strewn upon the rusted shelf between the guardrail and corroded metal coils, taut and towering into the darkness above.

No more hundred-hour workweeks. This was his final notice. No more blood on the floor of the company's altar that had tossed him out like a broken toy once it had used up every last vestige of his heart and soul.

He would never receive a gold pen or a designer watch for his contributions. His name would never be etched onto a silver plaque hanging in the shadows of a darkened hallway. Everything would go on as before, as if the past had never existed. The big men would continue to crunch their numbers until no one was left — until they inadvertently calculated even themselves out of the equation.

Then the big building would be abandoned. All that blood from those who gave so liberally would just turn into brown stains scotched with a steam cleaner.

A new edifice would then be built. A testament to the grandeur of greed. Men and women would climb over the bones of the dead in order to reach an unreachable plateau, and the ritual would repeat itself — ad infinitum.

But his part in the play was done. His parents, who doted on him, would wonder what had made him commit such a terrible act. Perhaps the stress of working those long hours had finally taken their toll. Yes, that was it. Whatever it took to swallow the reality.

It had all seemed so right. He was on top of the world. Like Icarus, he had flown directly toward the warmth of the sun, never worrying that his wings of feathers and wax would melt and bring about his demise.

He was like Lucifer too — so close to greatness only to be cast out at the exact moment of his most coveted dream.

This was his own Paradise Lost. But he would never find his way out of the abyss of Chaos and Old Night. He was not that lucky. All his life, he had been living on borrowed time, the church bell still echoing throughout the city signaling his death knell.

Careful not to rip his jacket on the jagged wire mesh, he climbed onto the three-foot metal parapet that separated him from death. As he tried to conjure up his last meaningful thought on earth, his feet slipped out from under him, and he fell toward the dark waters. Only then did he realize that he didn't want to die, that nothing was worth this. With arms flapping like an injured bird, he calculated his chances of survival.

A second before he hit the water, he reached up his hand to the sky so far above, to the unreachable heavens. His fist closed around the light of a burning star, capturing it before he plunged beneath the freezing darkness.

But the radiant sun a million light-years away continued to glow as strongly as ever. In his hand, there was, and always would be — nothing.

The river flowed silently on.

CHAPTER 4

THE ANGEL OF DEATH

The hospital room was a study in lack of contrast. Everything was white. The walls, the chairs, the floor, the bed, even the tubes running in and out of the body of the young girl were clear, therefore not a threat to the primacy of color.

She was no more than five or six years old. Her pale face was shrunken, and the once beautiful long blonde hair was a distant memory, seen only in old photographs when she was just a toddler.

Cancer. Diagnosed in her third year. Operations. X-rays. More operations. Chemotherapy. But the poison had spread, traveling the narrow pathways of her veins and arteries, laying a viper's nest in the fertile grounds of other organs.

She was at the end of life's rope, the sorrowful tapestry of her existence held together only by automated machinery, rhythmical pumps and bags of fluids hanging on poles to the left and right of the bed dripping liquid food and narcotics into her body through spiraling tubes.

The only sounds in the room were of beeps and mechanical inhalations and exhalations. It was night, and the intensive care unit of the hospital was quiet. Somewhere down the hall, there could be heard the swish of a damp mop being dragged sluggishly back and forth across tiled flooring. A muted phone would ring and be quickly picked up. A clipboard would be put back on a hook, punctuated by the soft scratching of a stiff white sheet being stretched over a mattress.

A shadow detached itself from the wall of the little girl's room. It had been standing there for quite some time. The sick child had not had any visitors at all that day. Maybe there was no one in the outside world who cared. The only people who came into the room did so on soft-soled shoes to fiddle with the apparatus. After that, they'd scrawl something on the chart and let it click back into place at the foot of her bed.

The Angel of Death stared down at the little girl. She did not open her eyes or acknowledge its presence in any way. Beneath the lids, there was movement, indicating deep sleep and dreams. The respirators increased their torque now and then to keep up with the changes of her heart rate. A gridded roll of paper emerged from the machine stationed to her left, the ink spiky and erratic. Somewhere down the hall, someone muffled a cough, which was immediately followed by a stifled yawn.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The City by Erik Hinrichsen. Copyright © 2016 Erik Hinrichsen. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---